throwaway205826

I just pretty clearly explained why I don’t need to understand every detail of the profession to accurately estimate someone’s capability. Which part of that was confusing?

Forgive me if I’m being brusque but you’re doing the same stupid defensive BS that incompetent doctors do when you ask them a question - “oh, and where did you go to medical school?”

Unironically, becoming a crystal healing hippy is probably better for you on expectation than subjecting yourself to the iatrogenic interventions the median doctor will probably subject you to. The same is true of e.g. faith based healing. It doesn’t matter if it literally does nothing except make you feel a bit better - that’s probably better than going to the doctor for most conditions.

Beyond that, doing a bit of research yourself will almost certainly give you better info than listening to whatever bullshit the CDC puts out for mass consumption. This isn’t specific to coronavirus or anything - this has always been true. Establishment medical organizations already have shit results, and it’s not going to get better when you throw political appointments in the mix. Same is true of health recs from other government bodies like USDA. Their health recs change constantly with no evidentiary basis.

No, but this is a very interesting question. Why do you ask?

If there were specific criteria that I could share in an HN comment, they would be used for hiring and immediately collapse under Goodhart’s law. Your question is almost tautologically bad - If I were able to answer it in a brief HN post, my answer would be bullshit.

You can accurately probe competence by asking people questions about their thought process, their current hypotheses, etc. If there are $BIGNUMBER tests for competence, you only need to ask $SMALLNUMBER of them to make an accurate determination as long as the person being asked doesn’t know them ahead of time! This is the same trick many zero-knowledge proof algorithms use.

> There is a tendency for smart people to think they know better than experts.

They probably do. People hate to recognize this because it goes against most western notions of the value of work ethic, but a couple stddev of intelligence is, in many cases, more valuable than many years of experience. Sad but true.

Hard to say what actually helped, but two high-impact low-cost behavioral changes I made (and stuck with) were a strict ketogenic diet and regular heavy exercise (mixture of cardio and weight training). Ketogenic diet has a lot going for it - besides being a nice elimination diet (in case your problem is some kind of dietary autoimmune condition or food allergy or something), it also treats a lot of possible metabolic conditions. Exercise as well. I’m sure resting (mentally) helped but I didn’t have much choice there - resting was the only activity I could really do, and even that I couldn’t do very well.

It’s hard to say what actually helped, but I tried a bunch of behavioral changes. Two I’ve stuck with are significantly increased exercise (half an hour plus of intense exercise every day) and a strict ketogenic diet. Even if they didn’t do anything at all for my primary condition, they’ve resulted in totally orthogonal improvements to my life. A couple months of rest (didn’t have much choice there - I couldn’t do anything else). I also used nicotine gum as a behavioral reinforcement drug to help “rehabilitate” myself on the way back to health, and THC to help me sleep.

FWIW, I think it’s unlikely my problem was burnout - I had a number of viral-characteristic physiological symptoms such as digestive problems, coughing, and heart palpitations, and I would be surprised if they had a purely neurochemical cause - but in either case hopefully some of these behaviors could help.

Yep, if you really want someone to think hard about your condition, a hospital is the wrong place to go. And a lot of doctors will become defensive when they realize you’ve put more thought into it than they have.

> Is that really the doctors fault?

It seemed that most of the doctors I had to deal with were incompetent either because they were lazy or stupid. Realistically maybe they were just overworked, but the effect was the same. I’m not really interested in assigning “fault” here - that’s just a factual observation I made.

A few years ago I got some kind of brain illness. Doctors were unable to come up with a strong diagnosis, which is apparently quite common for such cases.

One of the effects of the illness was that I essentially became stupid. I couldn’t focus on anything (even trivial activities like watching television), I couldn’t compose emails, I would get disoriented easily. It was absolutely terrifying not knowing whether or not my mind would come back. At the time, I would have preferred having a disease like cancer because at least I would know what I’m dealing with. Eventually I did start to get better. Like the author, I think I’m probably not quite back to who I was before getting sick.

A couple things I learned from my interaction with the medical system - 1. Like any other industry, 90% of medical “experts” are totally incompetent. 2. The state of diagnostics is pretty abysmal. So much of medicine is completely nonscientific guesswork. Most doctors aren’t even aware of the latest diagnostic developments in their own fields. Think about the people you know who learned Java in college and then never learned another programming language; chances are, your doctor is that kind of person.